LatinX genesis: On the origins of a mongrel species

Abstract

This essay focuses its attention on Madrid, the Royal Botanical Garden (RBG), and the LatinX presence just as they were all coming into existence in the Spanish and European world. Pursuing a LatinX origin that exceeds humanness, this thought exploration tracks the Mesoamerican dahlia, transplanted to Spain in 1789. Acocoxochitl—what we now know as the dahlia, named after Swedish naturalist Andreas Dahl (1751–1789)—was one of the first plants to arrive at Madrid’s RBG when it opened nearly three centuries ago. The flower was tested on, domesticated, and acclimated, making its botanical debut as the dahlia pinnata in 1791. The dahlia is a vector for an unanticipated life form, clueing us in on where the LatinX world-in-process was heading. It offers a glimpse of how the garden and the Latin find themselves arranged and come into being. How LatinX history is blurred—and how LatinX difference has been produced—in Madrid’s iconography is disentangled here. The piece weighs in on these considerations: What does it mean to think alongside the dahlia? What might the plant mean to a human whose body has been tampered with; who asymmetrically became one of Carolus Linnaeus’s Latin species; who has been “naturally” passed down to different kinds of nature; whose construction is both native and foreign; and who comes into being through a rather unnatural classificatory order?

“Europe is a garden. The rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle can invade the garden.” So declared the engraved focal point of a rather defiant Medici vase at an art exhibition in Madrid’s CentroCentro cultural venue. “The Weed Garden” (“El jardín de las malas hierbas”), an installation by the collective Todo por la Praxis (“All in the Name of Praxis,” or “[We’d do] Anything for Praxis,” TXP), inverted the European garden’s function, order, and beauty. The patch of land with deep roots from the Global South was included in CentroCentro’s show, “Everything Else” (“Todo lo demas”). The art group’s communal garden cultivated wild greenery, wild gatherings, and all the wild things in our lives. Their invasive plant kingdom yielded an assortment of Latin “silvēstris,” or, unencumbered botanical bodies crossing borders and barriers between good/evil, moral/immoral, conformity/rebelliousness, the admissible/the forbidden, natural/synthetic, and human/subhuman species. TXP’s “weed nature reserve” consisted of an “odd” ecosystem that cannot be prevented, removed, or exterminated. It hosted a quantum of seasonal bounty that ranged from transfeminist, antiracist, antipatriarchal, and anonymous to anticapitalist, anticolonial, racialized, migrant, and non-binary assemblages.

TXP’s restoration seized the words of Josep Borrell, former Foreign Minister of Spain and the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. He “described Europe as an idyllic ‘garden’ of prosperity and the rest of the world as mostly a ‘jungle’” (Liboreiro, 2022). Europe’s senior-most diplomat spoke with students at the European Diplomatic Academy in Belgium, telling them: “‘Yes, Europe is a garden, we have built a garden. Everything works[,]’ citing the continent’s political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion” (Preussen, 2022). He continued: “‘Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden,’ arguing, news outlets reported, that instead of building a wall, diplomats have to ‘go to the jungle.’” The political commotion became such that the official had to clarify: “the metaphor of ‘the garden’ and ‘the jungle’ is not my invention. […] My reference to ‘jungle’ has no racist, cultural, or geographical connotation. Indeed and unfortunately, the ‘jungle’ is everywhere, including today in Ukraine. […] Some have misinterpreted the metaphor as ‘colonial Euro-centrism.’ I am sorry if some have felt offended” (Borrell, 2022).

Borrell crops up as a twenty-first century variant of the all-too-powerful Enlightenment. His “apology” perpetuates perceptions that the jungle’s legible characteristics originate from mother nature’s recipes. Non-Europeans regress to their innate animality. Yet the jungle and the garden share the same sources. Despite the antagonism and clean-cut separation between the two, the jungle is a European construction. Stereotypes about dense African and Latin American jungles and the dark savages’ intrinsic racial traits are two representative cases. The “Jungle”—or the “Calais Jungle”—was also the term used by authorities for the refugee and immigrant encampment on the Northern French coast (cf., Hicks and Mallet, 2019; Calais Writers, 2017). Now dismantled, the “Jungle” operated from 2015 to 2016, housing inhabitants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.

Borrell’s prescriptive garden of social reform and moral wisdom does not offer much, sans exhorting warnings and exclusions. What does “the law,” rights, and the common good mean for Europe with regard to Global South plurality and the less-than-human? How should they be applied to the presumed jungle’s inferior mass of beings? Carrying these questions further, can the Global South’s wild and alienated creatures ever be thought of as part of Europe’s human communities? The unexamined life and currency of European ideals may prevail in Borrel’s imaginary, but the pictorial garden’s future and its stability are elusive.

The garden’s repurposed cri de coeur for underrepresented worlds, in capital letters, promoted a greater social good by attending to everything in the continent’s supply that is undesirable and displeasing. TXP’s plants identified what and who is threatening and troublesome. They encouraged the trespassing of what and who is not liked in the sphere of everyday life. They unlocked another type of respite—exceeding the idea of inactive leisure in the stress-filled Spanish capital. To paraphrase writer Jamaica Kincaid (2020a), the fissure between garden/jungle establishes “the borders [of] the eternal good and evil” (Kincaid, 2020a: xiv). The landscape becomes a daily exercise—weeds of reverie attuned to what European cycles continue to produce: the neglected presence of “problematic” persons, paired with tensions that do not go away in the “Old World.”

Where does the jungle, the garden, and nature end and begin for LatinXs? The trope of the jungle and its wild inhabitants admits the entwined flows of the everyday and in its more-than-human interactions. “The Weed Garden” heralds a European phase of changes and transitions. Its spirit embraces a knowledge spurred by “otherness” and the traces left from Europe’s past. How LatinX otherness lives alongside the hermeneutic inventory that makes up the Spanish capital is key to my deliberation. LatinX omissions in Madrid’s gardening and city life are foregrounded. I evaluate how Spanish creations like the dahlia’s presence in the Royal Botanical Garden (Real Jardín Botánico, RBG), parallel the formation of LatinX diasporic subjects. What is the public relationship among empire, Spanish national identity, and unweeded LatinXness, that inadequate “thing” on the outside of European articulation?

My preliminary thoughts tackle the meanings and the making of Madrid—which is to say the political aspirations and success in achieving “Madridness”—through LatinX margins. How Madrid patterns its urban allure and attraction by bringing in “more natural, noncity things into it” and renovates itself around “things” like the dahlia underlies this project (Fitzgerald, 2023). The city’s constructed invisibilities are at the center—in full view of a designed landscape. Its historic vision and cultural and intellectual authority typify Enlightenment ideals of reason, scientific and philosophical inquiry, art, the natural world, religion, and politics, to cite a few of its strands. I turn to Madrid’s outdoor spaces, notably the RBG, located at the heart of the city’s center, to survey the habitats of LatinX. The RBG is part of Madrid’s “Landscape of Light,” honored as a World Heritage site in 2021 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). And yet the Spanish capital’s national grandeur misses this crucial but forgotten lineage: Madrid—Maŷrit—is the only European capital founded by Muslims (cf. Gil-Benumeya, 2020). Madrid’s long-durational genealogy, its UNESCO-canonization as a symbol of universal value, and its cultural and historical energy impel further research and writing about the city and a LatinXness with supplemental signifiers swirling about, even through botanical splendor. Open—and porous—worlds within worlds exist here.

Historical author Giles Tremlett (2022) observes that Spain’s national anthem, the “Marcha Real” (“Royal March”), adopted in 1770, has no words. The nation’s character and Spanish citizens have been created and symbolized through this patriotic song. It circulates within a national community, despite its linguistic, ethnic, and geographic heterogeneity. Tremlett upholds that its members “cannot conjure up that treacly mixture of geography, history, folklore, and bombast that is the essence of such anthems. National pride cannot be put into words. Spain has no ‘national story’ that it can celebrate in comfort” (11). And, as it has been noted, “trying to write a set of words that will prove equally acceptable to the country’s diverse population of Castilian Spaniards, Catalans, Basques, etc. has been wisely left alone” (Pound, 2022). Yet Spain’s history coheres. Its founding of Spanish academies of history, language, and visual arts in the eighteenth century facilitated, in art historian Paul Neill’s (2015) phraseology, “nationalist seeing” (17–18). The Kingdom of Spain’s mythic constitution, priorities, hierarchies, and communal stability are found in its legacy of empire building and material sites like cathedrals, museums, palaces, universities, academies, public monuments, and botanical collections.

Spanish power dynamics are always present. If throughout the twentieth century, as philosopher Christian Sternard (2018) remarks, “many phenomenologists tried to develop a philosophical understanding of Europe,” how is a twenty-first century understanding of Europe formed with LatinXs in it (864)? What kind of Spanish cohesion surfaces through LatinXness? How LatinX history is blurred—and how LatinX difference is produced—in Madrid’s iconography is my analytical pursuit. I fix my attention on Spain’s extant cultural temperature and how LatinXs encounter public spaces in this milieu. What kinds of subjects have been produced on these historical and contested grounds? What is LatinX placemaking in Madrid? What contributions are LatinXs making to Spanish transatlantic history?

Historian David Ringrose (2008) examines how Madrid was developed into a physical expression of royal power. “European rulers,” he comments, “used their capital cities as stages for displaying and legitimizing their authority. They did so in part with recurrent displays of grandeur in the form of festivals, processions, and ephemeral architecture. When they could afford to do so, rulers also endowed their capitals with monuments, fountains, and impressive government buildings, using architectural styles associated with royal power and patronage. Habsburg Madrid in the seventeenth century saw numerous processions but few royal buildings; Bourbon Madrid of the eighteenth century saw a remarkable amount of royally sponsored reconstruction” (231–232). An implicit interaction among Crown, city, and urban society enforces Madrid’s physical reconfiguration as “a coherent artifact, […] as an entity in its own right, and as the locus of a broader public whose attitudes were important to the political life of the country” (232; 238).

Urban cultural studies scholar Benjamin Fraser (2017) explicates that Spain’s planning traditions reimagined the city as “emblematic triumphs of the modern age” (320). Spain was not an exception in adhering to the Enlightenment tradition’s scientific rationality. Its history is communicated, promoted, and held together via Madrid’s architectural composition, monuments, and management of public spaces. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger (2009) informs us that “architecture is what happens when people build with an awareness that they are doing something that reaches at least a little bit beyond the practical” (ix). Structures are affective, sensorial, and aesthetic experiences. Architecture harbingers, as Goldberger has it, delight, sadness, perplexity, awe, serenity, or exhilaration, and, along with this, it “inspires anxiety, hostility, or fear” (x). “Buildings can do all of these things, and more. They represent social ideals; they are political statements; they are cultural icons. Architecture is surely our greatest physical symbol of the idea of community, our surest way to express in concrete form our belief in the notion of common ground. The way a community builds tells you, sometimes, all you need to know about its values” (x). Goldberger underscores, as well, that buildings stand for “the power of memory” (xi). Madrid’s narrative linearity and ideological excess would make it seem like a LatinX nonplace, but given its role in producing and housing LatinX bodies its totality of meaning is disrupted. Architect and visual theorist Jonathan Hill (2001) proposes that architectural matter “can be made of anything and by anyone” (3). Designing LatinXness in a space that exalts Spanishness vis-à-vis invisibility and nonnormativity is no exception.

Philosophers Samantha Noll et al., (2020) put forward that “the contemporary philosopher of the city is working to (a) flesh out accurate conceptions of the city and/or aspects of urban life, (b) interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions concerning its structure and functions, and (c) identify new structures and meanings that could take hold in the future” (4). This synopsis guides us in disentangling Madrid’s colonial legacy so that it ceases to be a blank page in the annals of LatinX flows and history. Face-to-face with a murky genealogy, this meditation treats Madrid as a LatinX capital, a new site of LatinX inquiry. The Spanish capital houses eminent Xness, becoming a Capital X, a crucial space with underexplored records and opaque “X” histories. Turning Madrid to Capital X ushers in new awareness and a new urban perception that make Madrid graspable through its habitable and unhabitable X’s. Madrid is determinative of a centralized imperial regime, a national culture, the Spanish language, and the global transmission of “Spanishness.” Ideologies, political decision-making, rituals, practices, commerce, and modes of communication have given life to Madrid as “Madrid.” But LatinX life is transpiring in this city. In teasing out the new Madrid—with its new mobilities, human geographies, and Xness—what kinds of new maps and identifications is Capital X opening up? Who are our twenty-first century intrepid “X” companions? What happens to Madrid when it is associated with LatinXness rather than Spanishness? Journeying into one of Capital X’s small plots of the world takes us to the place of “the human” and human affairs in “the garden.”

In summoning “the garden,” I return to Kincaid (2020a), attendant to this verdant origin from her purview about the world’s “new” regions. The garden, as it has unfolded through European interventions, begins with the conquest. “Since August 3, 1492, the day Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain and then made a fatal encounter with the indigenous people he met in the ‘West Indies,’ the world of the garden changed,” she chronicles. “That endeavor, to me anyway, is the way the world we now live in began” (Kincaid, 2020a: xvii). Kincaid’s reappraisal speaks of the garden’s contemporary relevance, as those from the New World are ensnared in a book of European creation. An unidealistic garden has emanated where erasures, different designations, and unknowns come to be. “Plant hunters”—otherwise known as botanists—surfaced here. They “are the descendants of people and ideas that used to hunt people like me,” Kincaid says (Kincaid, 2020a: xxii; see, Kincaid, 2020b). This type of garden invites poignant lines of inquiry. What, “who am I,” and “where am I” in this garden of the world, she wonders (Kincaid, 2020a: xxv; Kincaid, 2020a: xv; Gordon, 2000). Her self-interrogation takes hold of her own history and the constitution of her selfhood.

Tracking one of LatinX’s beginnings to Madrid, I explore the what-ness, who-ness, and where-ness of Spain. Through LatinX’s European trajectory, I pursue how Spain as a place has been made, affixing it to “processes of mixture, flow, and interaction,” as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2021) elucidates. How is globality apparent and how is it invisible in Madrid? What common cultural referents circulate for LatinXs via the Spanish capital’s global urbanity?

To accomplish this interpretive task, I canvass human associations with the garden. Madrid’s RBG becomes the backdrop to LatinX beginnings in the European world. The Mesoamerican dahlia was one of the first plants to arrive when the RBG opened nearly three hundred years ago. An unexpected LatinX genesis pops up through the exoticizing, touching, retouching, nurturing, and the perfecting of this flower. What, I ask, is the dahlia’s role in LatinX knowledge-forming processes? Dahlias help us take a step forward by probing what else is—and what counts as—LatinX life outside the confines of race and gender. Certainly a long and central tradition of academic decolonial writing, where Indigenous knowledges and other ways of relating in the world through flora and fauna, exists (cf., Davis and Todd, 2017; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). This discussion is concerned with new forms and dialogues of LatinX “creativity, conviviality, and social innovation” instigated by the garden’s place in European history (Appadurai, 2021). Like anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015), “I practice arts of noticing” in the hazy directions of globalized LatinX cultures (255). The dahlia is a vector for an unanticipated life form clueing us in on where the LatinX world-in-process was heading (264).

Herbaria historica

Historian of science Londa Schiebinger (2004) summarizes how eighteenth-century botanical science—which entailed “expertise in bioprospecting, plant identification, transport, and acclimatization” (7)—worked alongside European colonial expansion and maritime trade across the globe. The earliest western record of dahlias comes from Francisco Hernández, a doctor and explorer who was given the title “First Physician General of the New Indies, Islands, and Terra Firma of the Ocean” by Spain’s King Phillip II (Grissell, 2020: 27). From 1570 to 1577, Hernández undertook an expedition to New Spain. He spoke of dahlias in “great variety” there (Grissell, 2020: 41). While “early conquistadors entered the Americas looking for gold and silver,” as Schiebinger explains, by the 1700s “naturalists sought ‘green gold’” for the colonial enterprise (7). Beset with what botanist Stefano Mancuso might call “green infatuation” (quoted in Fleming, 2020), the RBG’s director averred at the time: “a dozen naturalists and some chemists scattered in Spain’s dominions . . . Will offer an incomparably larger utility to the state than a hundred thousand men fighting for the enlargement of the Spanish empire” (quoted in Schiebinger, 2004: 8). England, France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain procured vast colonial holdings via “new markets in coffee, tea, sugarcane, pepper, nutmeg, cotton, and other profitable plants” (Schiebinger, 2004: 10).

The dahlia’s passage through time is one of experimentation, domestication, and adaptation. Transplanted to Spain in 1789, its arrival is credited to Vicente Cervantes (1758–1829), the Director of Mexico City’s Botanical Garden. He sent the seeds to Antonio José Cavanilles (1745–1804), a senior RBG staff member who served as its director from 1801 to 1804 as well as Madrid’s first professor of botany. Cavanilles “discovered,” illustrated, and honored this perennial genus after the Swedish naturalist Andreas Dahl (1751–1789). As Kincaid has put forth, the act of ownership takes hold in the garden: “to name is to possess” (2020a: xvi). In this sense, LatinX’s root—Latin—as a noun and adjective for Latino/a/e/@/X populations is truly Latin. It proffers a glimpse of how the garden and the Latin find themselves arranged and come into being.

The Aztecs first domesticated the variously colored flower heads, calling them acoctli, cocoxochitl, and acocoxochitl (Safford, 1919: 364). The Nahuatl word for the field flower has loose translations. They all derive from “cocotli, signifying, like the word ‘syringa,’ a hollow-stemmed plant; acocotli literally translated becoming ‘water-cane,’ or ‘water-pipe;’ cocoxochitl, ‘cane-flower’ or ‘hollow-stem flower’: and acocoxochitl, ‘water-pipe flower’” (ibid). These approximations reference the floret’s hollow stalks, which were conveniently covered, serving as water receptacles and straws to sip maguey—or, agave—juice (CEIICH UNAM, 2022). Acocoxochitl was used as an ornamental, medicinal, and food plant (Chawla et al., 2022: 277). “In the medicine cabinet,” they were essential “for the treatment of digestion, fevers, stomach pain, flatulence, coughs, mouth sores, and colic and as a diuretic and diaphoretic. Dahlia tubers contain insulin and were once used as a diabetic sugar. Mechanically, certain species of dahlias served as living fences, and being hollow, they also were perfectly adapted to certain aspects of plumbing” (Grissell, 2020: 41).

The dahlia was featured in Aztec gardens, where it was domesticated and cultivated before Mexico’s conquest and America became recognized as such. Dahlia records in the Aztec world are traced back to the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis—or, the “Little Book of Indian Medicinal Herbs”—abbreviated to the Badianus Manuscript of 1552. The manuscript is “an illustrated Aztec herbal of great significance in the study of medicine and botany in the Americas. It is the earliest known work on Mexican medicinal practices and treatment of diseases” (Tisch Library, n.d.). Its Nahuatl name figures there as Couanenepilli, with this illustration possibly being an example of the dahlia coccinea (De la Cruz, 1940: 143). This drawing supports the claim that dahlias have been “reliably recognized 250 years before their name was coined” (Grissell, 2020: 41). The Badianus Manuscript was first written in Nahuatl by Martinus de la Cruz (Martin de la Cruz), an Aztec physician acknowledged under his Catholic name, and later translated into Latin by Juannes Badianus (Juan Badiano), an Aztec lecturer at the Colegio de Indios de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (cf., De la Cruz, 1940).

In 1791, Cavanilles christened the first plant to bloom in Europe as “Dahlia pinnata after its pinnate foliage; the second, Dahlia rosea for its rose-purple color. In 1796 [he] flowered a third plant […], which he named Dahlia coccinea for its scarlet color” (Srivastava and Trivedi, 2022: 392). The dahlia pinnata was unveiled in Cavanilles’s illustrated book Icones et Descriptiones Plantarum (1791), where he spoke of its “persistent tuberous root,” together with its “annual stems” being “smooth, hard, branched, glabrous” in appearance, “like all plants” (57). “I saw it live in the garden of Madrid in October,” he affirmed (ibid).

Cavanilles, as Spain’s leading taxonomic botanist, was in charge of sending seeds from “the flower that fascinated conquistadors, botanists, and men of letters in New Spain,” as the RBG conveys it, to European botanical gardens in Berlin, Dresden, London, Montpellier, and Paris (Real Jardín Botánico, 2016). Brussels, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, and Leiden were not overlooked in this seed distribution plan either (Sorensen, 1970: 136). “Having placed living dahlias in the hands of plant breeders in the horticultural centers of Europe, the portents of a new floral industry were assured,” botanist Paul D. Sorensen (1970) declared, as the dahlia became a new garden plant (137). Cavanilles’s new crops—dahlia pinnata, dahlia coccinea, and dahlia rosea—are “the major species involved in the development of new age dahlias,” fomenting the hybrids that are seen today (Chawla et al., 2022: 277). Gerald Weland (2015), author of the American Dahlia Society’s well-referenced brief, reports that “the original discoveries were single flowered types, from which, through hybridization and selective breeding, the double forms … emerged” (5). The dahlia coccinea was a single flower, “but for the first thirty years, these were practically ignored in favor of the ‘double’ types. In those early dahlias the word doubles was apparently used to simply designate flowers with more than one row of petals. The greatest effort in the early days of the dahlia in Europe was directed toward developing improved types of ‘double’ dahlias” (ibid).

The European dahlia—Mesoamerica’s ordered and disordered doppelganger—was molded and preferred in doubled form. Its biformity was a driving force in Europe. Some botanists have proposed that indigenous groups may have had a rather rigid awareness of the dahlia’s twoness, a botanical duality handed down by Europeans with limited hermeneutic possibility. Sorensen (1970), for example, speculated that the dahlia’s “rare occurrence of an abnormal double-flowered form” must have “surely aroused enormous interest” among the Aztecs since this innovation “was considered a phenomenon of grave significance” (134). He ignites a question: “Might one not guess that an Aztec apothecary, seeing a double-flowered dahlia for the first time, would have reasoned its healing powers to be also ‘doubled?’” This interpretation assigns an Aztec understanding of a literal twoness—more flower, more power, so to speak, as opposed to pivotal worldviews and greater consciousness illuminated by life forms that are already lived through simultaneous dualities.

The dahlia, a product of a collective European imagination coveting twoness, is held together by a dual state symbolizing being inward and outward. Ongoing botanical tinkering conjured up a hybridized body. It launched a mixture with double origins, twinned narratives, and two sorts of cohabitation. Duality is fraught with meaning among the Aztecs. It was a fundamental cosmological idea, historian of religion and anthropologist David Carrasco (2011) makes known (23). In Aztec culture, “the best instruments for expressing a human duality that reflected and communicated the dual dimensions of the divinity were metaphors that generally consisted of two words or phrases joined to form a single idea, like ‘flower and song,’ meaning poetry or truth” (Carrasco, 2011: 98). There’s an illusory “difrasismo,” Carrasco posits, “or two things that together meant something else” (98). The dahlia’s doubled European double is decentered through a difrasismo, disguise, or concealment of a oneness pointing to what may be buried but hardly forgotten: its inherent Xness. This Xness extends to the plants and their unknowability. Mancuso reminds us that plants compose “87% of life,” yet are intrinsically othered, “so different from us” (quoted in Fox, 2023). Interestingly and compellingly, they “move around an obstacle”: their roots change “direction well before touching” an obstruction (Fox, 2023). Plants are not inert in the ground. They abandon fixity, eliciting incessant movement, resilience, and survival. Dahlias live a double life: above- and underground.

Another variety, the dahlia crinita, was more precise about its namesake. One of Dahl’s friends from Uppsala, Sweden assigned special meaning to it in 1792: “the species epithet crinita comes from the Latin word for longhaired, which aimed at Dahl’s big beard” (Swedish Museum of Natural History, n.d.). Botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow (1765–1812), the Director of Berlin’s Botanical Garden, attempted to change the dahlia’s nomenclature to Georgina, in honor of explorer and chemist Johann Gottlieb Georgi (1729–1802). Central and eastern Europeans employed the name Georgina for a while. Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) subsequently wrote the song “Georgina Polka” in 1840, intermingling botany’s “natural bodies” with Europe’s polyphony. The plants went from botanical creation to musical invention.

Impulses to modify the dahlia and capture the authority behind its name persisted. Constant revisionary naming, unnaming, and renaming intimate successive displacements. Each name denotes a blank slate and an abstractness, as the dahlia waits to be written on, distorted, recreated, and undone again. The Dahlia/Georgina name split generated confusion, “with the partisans of Dahlia at loggerheads with the partisans of Georgina” (Cumo, 2013: 366). But the homage to Dahl hardly faded. London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 “put the dahlia on the map in a new way, introducing it to a wider cross-section of society and increasing demand. The upper classes had been installing ‘dahlia walks’ in their gardens—grassy paths lined with wide beds of dahlias so they could admire the blooms—but now the average backyard gardener wanted dahlias as well. Dahlias were said to symbolize dignity to the Victorians, with their upright stalks, though the meaning broadened over time to include elegance, respect, compassion, and a lifelong bond” (Weaver, 2022: 13). Dahlias were a phenomenon, becoming the star of European gardens. Horticulturalists bred additional varieties because they were—and remain—“easy to hybridize” (Weaver, 2022: 13).

“The beauty of the new cultivated flowers won widespread acclaim,” writes historian Mike Dash (1999: 217). Everyday aficionados fixated on perfecting the dahlia through a trifecta of form, color, and size. Scottish botanist Robert Hogg (1818–1897) offered gardening tips for dahlia beginners—advising that “the plant should be of a dwarf habit growth; that is, not exceeding three to four feet high, and the branches stout, without being too numerous, giving the plant a dense and bushy appearance” (1853: 6). “Dahlias are grown as much for show in the garden as for exhibition purposes,” he professed (Hogg, 1853: 18). The dahlia imperialis, now planted throughout the US South, was introduced in 1863, having first grown in Europe at Zurich’s Botanic Garden (Weland, 2015: 7). In this period, poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) also cultivated and displayed dahlias in her garden and/or in the glass enclosure of a conservatory that was built just for her naturalized or native flowers in Amherst, Massachusetts (Farr, 2004: 299).

“Dahlia mania”—almost as zealous as the seventeenth-century’s tulipomania—swept through nineteenth-century English gardens. The flowers became so wildly popular that “within 15 years of its introduction, England developed 300 distinct cultivars from a few types” (Srivastava and Trivedi, 2022: 391). Since then, dahlias “have been the subject of intense modification genetics that has produced more than 50,000 cultivated varieties. These have changed their characteristics by increasing the inflorescence, forms of ray flowers, diversity of colors, size of individuals, and flowering time” (Chawla et al., 2022: 277). We come across a LatinX source of life “produced as a reproduction, the origin of which is deferred ad infinitum. Life is an echo of itself, resonating with equal non-originarity in all living beings” (Marder, 2013: 34).

Ideas about nature’s improvement and management, historian Sophie Brockmann (2020) comments, “emerged within the context of two much-debated historical phenomena: the Enlightenment, and the Spanish Empire’s so-called Bourbon Reforms” (6). The Bourbons sought to renovate the Spanish state, which was modeled on France. “Reforms included the expansion and restructuring of state bureaucracy, intensified record keeping, the promotion of state institutions, the demand for more rigorous urban and architectural planning, and the promotion of education” (Niell, 2015: 16). “From French physiocrats to Charles III’s ministers in Madrid,” Brockmann adds, “eighteenth-century scholars and politicians looked to the production of useful knowledge through the scientific study of nature as key to exploiting a kingdom’s natural wealth” (8). Natural history voyages in those days made “imperial nature visible,” in art historian Daniela Bleichmar’s (2012) appraisal (12). The Spanish Indies—“which at the time comprised a significant swath of the globe: much of South America; all of Central America; the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and half of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles; a great part of North America; and the Philippine Islands” (Bleichmar, 2012: 3)—became a garden with which to study and experiment. Plants and perceptions about the Americas made their way into public spheres. European gardens contributed to and fostered the construction of the non-Western other.

Founded in 1755 under King Fernando VI, Madrid’s RBG was initially located on the city’s outskirts, by the Manzanares River. King Charles III—recognized for his late eighteenth-century approach to spruce up and modernize the Spanish capital and described with the alias dictus “Madrid’s best mayor”—transferred the Garden to their current location at the Paseo del Prado in 1781 (Fraser, 2017: 320). Its architects, Francesco Sabatini (1722–1797) and Juan de Villanueva (1739–1811), were charged with modeling a pleasant garden and a facility for research, education, and archiving. Charles III’s tenure (1759–1788) “formally joined and contributed funding to new learned societies, promoted university reform, paid to build new highways and canals, and bought stock in various new trading companies” (Ringrose, 2008: 237). The RBG belongs to the National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Spain’s largest research institution, “designed to be at the cutting edge of botanical sciences” (Cox, 2014: 272). Ringrose gauges the RBG’s strategic geographic locale as “royally sponsored Enlightenment,” where the Prado and the Botanical Garden have a prominent role (2008: 245). “Eighteenth-century Madrid,” he infers, concretizes how Charles III’s “effective monarchy used its capital city as a vehicle for royal propaganda” (2008: 245).

As Spanish botanists explored exotic lands, the diversity of the plant life they brought back required biological study to assess their usefulness. The Jardín de Aclimatación de La Orotava—or the Botanical Garden Puerto de La Cruz—was established in 1788 by Charles III. It served as a collection point, testing site, and delivery hub in Tenerife, Canary Islands. Prior to relocating tropical plants, flowers, and trees from the Spanish colonies and the Philippines to mainland Spain, they were experimented on for economic and medicinal profit in Tenerife (Micklewright and O’Malley, 2023: 171). The plants would not have “survived direct transfer to Europe. It was about acclimatizing them in the Canary Islands so that later on they could withstand the European cold” (Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2017).

As the RBG expanded, it was organized in three sections, or terraces. The beds were arranged under the Linnaean system of classification. Swedish botanist and physician Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), famed as the “King of Flowers” in his native country and Dahl’s professor, is regarded as the father of modern taxonomy. He coined botanical Latin, as journalist and author Kathryn Schulz (2023) has succinctly put it, devising the binomial nomenclature for naming and grouping all living organisms, which is still in use. Plant and animal species have two-word Latin designations: the first references the genus to which the plant or animal belongs and the second accounts for that group’s species. Under the Linnaean systematization and lumping together of all living things, the nature of the world and the nature of the human “races” were unified through hierarchically differentiated physical features and racial taxonomic classification. Historian John S. Haller (1995) sets forth that Linnaeus’s racial thinking was broken down into four families of man where color criterion were sustained. His racial outline, also under a binomial system, bears: “Homo Americanus as reddish, choleric, obstinate, contented, and regulated by customs; Homo Europeus as white, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle, and governed by laws; Homo Asiaticus as sallow, grave, dignified, and ruled by opinions; and Homo Afer as black, phlegmatic, cunning, lazy, lustful, careless, and governed by caprice” (4).

Historians Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner (2013) identify the Enlightenment’s core question—“What is man?”—as one that ushered in more precise queries from the Western mind’s canon: “What are the characteristics of man—those which make him different from apes? Are there ape-men or at least some varieties of mankind more ape-like than others? Do ‘monstrous’ races really exist, as had been assumed since antiquity? […] Were human features innate or the result of a dominant external factor (and if they were, which one? climate? natural surroundings? nourishment? customs? political organization?) or were they the result of a combination of several internal/external factors” (53). The names, the content, the settled science, the philosophy, the questions: they are all inseparable from the language that wills it into being. Schulz raises a concern with no tidy solution: “if categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus” (Schulz, 2023)? Or, if you prefer, how does the all-encompassing empirical certainty of the Linnaean sign system—with or without a classification for Linnaeus—epistemologically liberate LatinXs? To recalibrate the question just posed: What unforeseen missteps have creeped into the making and remaking of the LatinX dahlia? LatinX’s equivocations, unpredictability, and awkwardness brings us to a fraught but luxuriant LatinX pastoral. The Enlightenment’s manipulated environment and its boundaries are a productive LatinX genesis for what troubles and unsettles. The LatinX landscape dismantles presumably fixed patterns. It opens up an eclectic intellectual history with no particular devotion to Linnaeus. The Linnaean system cannot support LatinX’s ongoing modifications, search for its own meanings, and gravitation toward new names and becomings.

The garden experience exposes plants and populations as specimens. Geographer David N. Livingstone (2013) submits that “between the archive and the field, the world of the museum and the world of nature, stands the garden. A site of botanical and zoological inquiry, the garden has a complex spatial history in which different purposes and practices have intermingled” (48–49). Europe’s first “physic” gardens, as botanical gardens were called because they thrived in universities’ medical faculties, were established in Padua and Pisa in the early 1540s and at Oxford in 1621. “The four continents were each allocated their literal ‘quarters’ in the garden,” with botanical plant species acclimatized in the remaking of nature “to suit the new industrial order” (52; 55). The RBG was “the most active institution in the project to rediscover and reconquer nature in the Hispanic empire” (Bleichmar, 2012: 24). The voyages “symbolize[d] the human taming of nature and his new confidence about his place in the world” (Gharipour, 2017: xvii). By the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans had founded 1,600 botanical gardens worldwide not as “merely idyllic bits of green intended to delight city dwellers, but experimental stations for agriculture” (Schiebinger, 2004: 11). As agents of empire, experiment, and Enlightenment, these sites reproduced global biogeography and wielded biomedical power (Livingstone, 2013: 54).

International household dahlias continue to grow in its Mesoamerican habitat—in the wild—where they can be admired in their simplest form. Sorensen maintains that if dahlias grew in New England and behaved as they do in Mexico—thriving “along the highways, growing out of cliffs, among boulders, in cultivated fields alongside the milpa or maize […] and on open slopes of the volcanic mountains”—they would “surely [be] regard[ed] as weeds” (123). These “weeds of Mexico,” as he calls the early dahlias, “are the progenitors of our garden dahlias” (ibid). The garden dahlia’s wild—X—nature cannot be omitted. After the bulbous plant had been mass produced and celebrated throughout the world, the acocoxochitl returned to Mexico as the LatinX dahlia, when it became the national flower in 1963. President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964) issued a decree that year at the suggestion of private institutions like the Botanical Society of Mexico, the National Union of Flower Growers and Nurseries, and the Excelsior newspaper, during the VII National Floriculture Exhibition in 1962 (Luna Monterrojo, n.d.). Iconic artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) kindled the spirit of Mexicanness by donning traditional garments and adorning herself with dahlias, often wearing them on her hair (Grimes, 2015). She also painted them in the still life The Flower Basket (1941), where she included other native Mexican flowers.

The dahlia is a main figure in public holidays and national days of remembrance. Three years after Columbus’s quincentenary, for instance, the Mexican Society of the Dahlia or Acocoxochitl selected the Día de la Raza (Day of the Race)—12 October 1995—as its founding date. This day commemorates Christopher Columbus’s arrival to America from which, the popular belief goes, a new race of mestizo people—or, a new breed of flowers—emerged. The Day of the Race—or the “Day of the Encounter”—honors “more widely […] mestizo nationhood and pan-national Latin American identity” (Wade, 2017: 229). Mexico started this observance in 1928, under the direction of former prime minister of education José Vasconcelos (1882–1959). His theory of racial mixing culminates in a Mexican/Latin American “cosmic race,” wherein a new humanity, era, and future aesthetics arise, but through the erasure of indigenous and Afro-descended groups (cf., Vasconcelos, 1997). In 2020, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) led an initiative to offcially amend the name of 12 October to the “Day of the Pluricultural Nation” (TV Azteca, 2022).

The final days of Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States correspond with 12 October as well. This annual period, from 15 September to 15 October, honors Hispanic, Latino/a, and LatinX histories and communities who are all presumably unified by language, food, and music—or ethnic and cultural commonalities that align, through distorting uniformity, with a collective sociopolitical consciousness. Across the Atlantic, 12 October represents the National Day of Spain (Fiesta Nacional de España) and the Día de la Hispanidad (or Columbus Day). This day’s celebrations are presided by King Felipe VI and Queen consort Letizia in Madrid. The ceremony alludes to past military victories and colonial legacy, generally featuring a parade with “more than 4,000 soldiers, a hundred vehicles, 37 motorcycles, 26 helicopters, and 58 planes” (El País, 2022).

Iberian cultural studies scholar Germán Labrador Méndez (2022) says that this parade’s colonial character “has become a veritable time warp” (80). Even though Spain “has not been geopolitically sovereign for three centuries, and the foreign action of its armies today is executed fundamentally in the Mediterranean,” he scrutinizes, “the memory of its army continues to be Atlantic” (ibid). The army’s staging, transmission, and conservation of Spanish Atlantic memory has no room for Madrid’s contemporary background: LatinX transatlantic memory and timelines. But LatinXness cannot be stashed away in these organized performances and projections of Spanish unified wholeness. LatinXness may be hidden and marginalized, but its presence interrupts and questions Spain’s foundation. The date in which the Mexican Society of the Dahlia or Acocoxochitl was established seemingly makes the flower one of Hispanidad’s recognizable attractions: the cosmic dahlia. The emergence of this Hispanic Heritage Month Cosmic Thing, as it were, deviates from Vasconcelos’s logic of amalgamation and Hispanic coherence. LatinXness and the dahlia are uncontainable, making us do the work on the subject for which each other’s Xness stands.

Contemporary Chicana writer Myriam Gurba (2007) concentrates on the dahlia as odd, peculiar, and queer—terms of inquiry defying normativity. Her dahlia is a symbol for “a freak magnet” among “los weirdos de este mundo” (90). Desiree, the narrator in Gurba’s titular short story, “Dahlia Season,” concedes that when her “petals unfurled […] they were dark” (92). “I was a dahlia, an artist, a goth chick,” her self-descriptors reveal, “what boys who dug females like me termed ‘death bunnies’” (92). Desiree and the dahlia are dark, alien, and interchangeable. Gurba references the Black Dahlia, “this really, really famous murder victim,” Elizabeth Short, whose 1947 case remains unsolved in Los Angeles County (12). She embraces an aesthetic of dark excess—via a wild, black flower, a “damaged” mutant of Cavanilles’s trinity—to narrow down on an alternative ethos and nonconformity.

The United States suffused the story of the LatinX dahlia also. In the early-twentieth century alone, two new flower species from Guatemala were “discovered.” The dahlia popenovii was dubbed after American marriage counselor, eugenicist, and agricultural explorer Paul Popenoe (1888–1979), who laid claim to this herbaceous plant “in the mountains of Guatemala” (Safford, 1919: 368–369; see Lepore, 2010). The dahlia maxonii—in Alta Verapaz, and across the boundary into Chiapas—is an homage to botanist William R. Maxon (1877–1948). Maxon “made nine considerable excursions to the American tropics, visiting Jamaica (repeatedly), Cuba, and various places in Central America, making extensive collections of both ferns and flowering plants” (Weatherby, 1948: 102). Poponoe saw the dahlia “in all its glory” in December 1916—impressing him “as being an unusually fine decorative plant,” one that “should be cultivated in the United States” (Safford, 1919: 373). The American Dahlia Society was founded just one year prior, in 1915, “a non-profit organization founded for the purpose of stimulating interest in, disseminating information about, and promoting the culture and development of, the dahlia” (American Dahlia Society, n.d.).

LatinX populus

The deracinated but itinerant dahlia is the “thing” that was made up and anchored in Madrid’s “natural habitat.” Staged along with daffodils, hellebores, camellias, rhododendrons, tulips, and salvias, the dahlia’s “flowerization”—as “something” that entails a method of observation—unsettles its European placeless place. Extricated and isolated from its context, it was “rectified” upon arrival, created to always be seen, and to be displayed again and again. Yet it has an intellectual purpose, obliging us to inquire about what exactly we are looking at. The dahlia has been thrown back into the wild, into LatinX’s “X” of the unknown and the deep end of the theoretical weeds. Its durability, engineered pizzazz, and sense of wonder, to say nothing of its origins and otherness, kick off the beginnings of a LatinX sphere of activity.

The RBG’s existence for nearly three centuries has sprouted the dahlia’s lively LatinX matter—inducing LatinX kindred, if you will. The dahlia has been a protagonist in the global processes that have shaped LatinX as a political and historical consequence. What is LatinX nature in this formulation of floral beauty, “the leisurely experience,” and inner transformation through the spell of natural environments? Literary scholar, conceptual photographer, and music composer María DeGuzmán (2019) has imagined “botanical epistemologies” as an approach of vital relevance that draws from “seemingly disparate things” in the scaffolding of LatinX frameworks, dialogues, histories, and subjectivities (110). She urges agility, punctuating: “Qualities of plant life—development, diversity, adaptability, self-nourishment or autotrophy, and mobility—provide intriguing models for Latina/o Studies” (110). Dahlias are a prelude to the timeless, dehistoricized LatinX subject within history. They have been deterritorialized and reterritorialized—and have been meaningful all along. As philosopher Michael Marder (2013) contends: “A plant’s growth is the first indication of faithfulness to its milieu” (222). Dahlias are faithful to the process of reproduction—“like reproduces like,” historian of science Lorraine Daston (2019) determines (26, iBook). The dahlia’s fidelity to alien environments is the raison d’être into oblique relations, unexpected findings, and appreciation for new thoughts that are inseparable from Spanish archives and their LatinX impact.

The RBG is a tourist destination, receiving about 485,000 national and international visitors in 2022 alone. This estimate exceeds the number of sightseers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic when, on average, approximately 400,000 people were admitted annually (2023). On social media—another form of marketing communication—the RBG calls itself “a living museum and a research center dedicated to the knowledge, defense, conservation, and dissemination of flora” (Real Jardín Botánico, Instagram, 2023). Its homepage tells us that it is “full of biodiversity with more than 5,500 species of plants from all over the planet” (rjb.csic.es, n.d.). The RBG counts in its collection “the most important herbarium in Spain, with more than one million samples of dried plants (called sheets), mostly arrived with the scientific expeditions of the Spanish Crown to other countries” (Salvador Lozano, n.d.: 12). These dried Hispanic flowers of the Hispanic empire—systematically stored and catalogued—lie in wait for botanical metamorphosis. Even when concealed and seemingly dormant, the sheets are alive and remain manipulated. They are an invisible supply of unspecified and unknown X’s—of something that could potentially turnout extremely good, extremely bad, or extremely complicated.

What does it mean to think alongside the dahlia? What might the plant mean to a human whose body has been tampered with; who asymmetrically became one of Linnaeus’s Latin species; who has been “naturally” passed down to different kinds of nature; whose construction is both native and foreign; who comes “to be” through a rather unnatural classificatory order; and who is exclusively known in a “world of only proper nouns” (Daston, 2019: 25, iBook)? The RBG is an archive for how the LatinX subject—and what turns to flower X, dahlia X, or dahliX—are works “against nature,” as Daston might call them, a lower form of being under the scala naturae’s hierarchical structuring of life. What values and principles have been trafficked into—and transferred onto—nature through this X body politic? Why do we continue to seek values in nature, Daston solicits (18, iBook)? “Why do human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, pervasively and persistently, look to nature as a source of norms for human conduct? Why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make,” she probes further (14, iBook). Schiebinger’s (2004) sifting of “who owns nature” applies here not in the proprietary sense, but as a potent stimulus for interpretive thought (17). How do we give equal significance to the dahlia—that “thing” with whom we share a LatinX lineage? Philosopher and political theorist Jane Bennett ventures upon the lives of objects, asking why they’re “so alluring” and what it is “they are ‘trying’ to do” (quoted in Meis, 2023). The dahlia and its thingness emerged in a specific nature: the botanical garden. Long-honored beliefs on nature, as Daston peruses them, hold up at the RBG: “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” (15, iBook). The antonyms for these qualifiers are pertinent too: bad, false, ugly.

In the dahlia’s context, these attributes do not cause repulsion or antagonism. They provoke discomfort within the institutions that have “domesticated” the plant. The dahlia has a long and burdensome history. Even so, it assists us in contemplating and integrating historical moments in which—to draw from theorist B. V. Olguín (2021)—“the full spectrum of ‘violences’” are uncovered, as they pertain to “the salience of violence in Latina/o theories of being and knowing” (3; 12). Olguín’s theoretical underpinning of violentology brings together an “inventory of violence” that “includes warfare, but also extends into the cultural and political dimensions of lived experiences in a highly militarized, capitalist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal society such as the United States and its dominions, but also beyond” (22). The dahlia’s separation from the human is far from abstract. To take note of—and to ruminate with—the dahlia is to ponder on its “lively powers of material formations” and the knowledge it unearths (quoted in Meis, 2023). To be LatinX—and to emerge as dahliX—lead to a coexistence that inquires, as Tsing (2015) asks in her effort to disentangle what manages to live despite capitalism, “how else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made” (viii)?

How does it feel to be a dahlia? Such an implausible, if not unthinkable, question opens up the LatinX world to other problem situations, natural directions, sensitivities, and engagement with what may amount to, for some, as “laughable concepts” (Fleming, 2020). What are we to take from this? Mancuso advances that flora possess awareness, debunking their silent and passive “vegetative state” (quoted in Fleming, 2020). The premise of the dahlia as a living entity may prove to be an amusing idea, as does the necessity behind the “LatinX” label for the Latino/a being (see, Archie, 2023; Associated Press, 2023; Bernal, 2023). Yet they fit awkwardly together. The flower and the human share an originary X. How can LatinXs become a better, more intuitive, and ethical species by being mindful of the behavior of our fellow organisms (cf., Fleming, 2020)?

Seen as such, LatinX ontological embodiment is altered. LatinXness is not just preoccupied with human margins, but also with unfamiliar things and problematic non-human peripheries—“insignificant Others” (Hall, 2011: 1)—that have been constantly ignored. How does the dahlia muddle and reorient LatinX’s constitution into new forms of existence? The provocation how does it feel to be a dahlia coevally incites a parallel concern: how does it feel to be dahlia-like? This is another way of asking: how do these two domains meet and what gets ideologically, culturally, and humanly ruptured? How do dahliXness and LatinXness interact? The dahlia is a historical figure not yet thought about, thought with, related to, or written about. It has not been present in the LatinX present, and it is not present in the LatinX past. The dahlia’s itinerary since the colonial encounter contributes to the power of LatinXness in Europe and the Americas.

There’s no going back for Madrid’s dahlia. Its existential grounding in an institutional setting lifts the curtain on the RBG’s unconventional roots, as its creation and triumphant vision of botanical Spanishness relies on figures of transit. The flowers’ materiality and miscellaneousness of their LatinXness has gone unnoticed and uninterrogated. Dahlias have contributed to the making of—and desire for—“Spanish History.” They pull our eyes toward their colors’ exquisite depths during their flowering peak from July to December. They show up unexpectedly—and in unpredictable ways. The dahlia: that thing—that first thing, that old thing—with obscured origins. That impure Spanish thing. That “silent being,” that “colorful extra” (Mancuso, 2022: 1; 3). The last thing on anyone’s mind, living among us. Entering the dahlia’s history in the garden, as Kincaid might say, has a “special, powerful place in our lives and our imaginations” (2020a: xv).